Powerful

                   Power is not a sensation women usually indulge in much. Growing up, the idea of a powerful woman drew images tainted with masculinized women, and certainly not one that would be deemed worthy of any valuable attention. Pages of magazines only ever had images of small, dainty women, and nowhere in my world did I see anything other than these tiny women, touted as what one must ultimately want to become.

                    When I run, I get such a powerful feeling. I have never done drugs, so I can only loosely liken the feeling to a strong high. My entire being soars and all my earthly problems are quickly brought to their knees. It's as if for the duration of the run, life's light of clarity were turned on and a secret wisdom were transmitted to me, but just for that run. If you are a non-runner you are probably thinking I have gone nuts. But if you are a runner, you know exactly what I am describing. My issue with this feeling is when I attempt to visualize myself owning this power I have trouble envisioning both me and this power as one, without having it tainted with masculinity. This troubles me. Its obvious that most of us women are missing enormous amounts of mental visual vocabulary when it comes to strong women, to the point that when we see a strong woman we meet it with fear, repulsion and/or distrust.

                   This lack images of strong women in our cache of mental images is no mistake; we ultimately live in a world where there is a huge profit to be made from making us feel less worthy by convincing us we are not good enough just the way we are. Second, there are also few female role models that immediately pop to mind that are both strong AND have a distinctive female flavor, for lack of a better description. Which leaves us with the question, can women be powerful and manage to avoid being defined or seen in masculine terms? I say there is, yet, we need to define this new "powerful" in a language of our own, a language not yet written. Just like parents clamoring to urgently invent and shape the role and responsibilities of their children in the midst of newly invented electronics, there are no pre-existing rules in either case. It is up to us women, who feel this power, to define, interpret and clarify this new path and construct, from scratch this missing visual language for other women to also envision and work towards.

                         Where to begin? I have already begun by boldly claiming my spaces with my presence without an ounce of personal body shame, or negative self-talk. I have learned that regardless of who one is, how one looks, we all deserve the right to walk freely and occupy all spaces with comfort and ease. This may sound terribly mundane and insignificant to most men, yet, the majority of women know all too well the feeling of negative self-talk that invades our thoughts. I have met women from age 18-80 who constantly battle negative self-talk daily and it's so destructively subtle that most never even know they don't have to live with this feeling. Again, only in showing women in the way we carry ourselves with confidence and unwavering self-compassion can we even hope to breed a new generation where strong is part of a young woman's mental image.